7.21.2014

5 Homeschool-y Printables

I'm thinking ahead for school this fall, and wanted to share some of the printables I made for myself for last year. You can download each free printable pdf by clicking on the links below and then selecting download when you see the preview.

1. My Weekly Lesson Records are sorta boring, but a practical resource. One of the biggest things I learned last year is that I rarely ever stick to my lesson plans, and that's okay. I map out what we need to accomplish for the year and divide it by weeks in a word document. When we get off track, I scribble and draw arrows all over that paper. When the week is finished, I record what we actually did here on these templates that I save in my folder. That way, I don't have to feel bad about scribbling, and my record at the end of the year is nice and tidy. I preferred printing 2 weeks/page on 9 pages front and back for 36 weeks. Grab the planners here: 2 weeks/page and 1 week/page

2. The girls wanted to earn money, so we developed this Chore and Allowance Chart. I tried to keep all of the earnings in 10's as a way to further reinforce the math the kindergartener is learning. She helps tally it up at the end of the week. We slip these in a plastic sleeve and use dry erase markers so we can reuse them each week. There are two per page: grab it here.

3. This was a fun idea I got from another homeschooling mom. When the kids clean up their space, I leave these House Fairy Reward Cards for them to find later. I try not to warn them ahead of time - its just a fun reward for cleaning up their mess. They trade it in for a chocolate from Daddy's office. The pdf is just black and white, and I printed mine on pink construction paper (which is my favorite new trick for printing with color and not using up my ink!) Download it.

4. Isn't it awesome when the reading skills suddenly click and your little one takes off! I made these Book and Chapter Reading Charts for my new reader earlier this year. Whenever she read a book on her own, she x'ed a circle. When she got to 50 books, we went out for ice cream. I really thought the 50 books would take longer, so when she finished in a week I started her on chapter books. These charts really motivated her, and now she's read all of my old American Girl books! Get them: "I read 50 Books" chart and "I read 50 chapters!" chart.

5. Finally, I printed these Talk Nicely Cards. If I spend a lot of time correcting the kids ("Can you say that again nicely?", "What do you say?", etc.) I start to get a bit discouraged. So to lighten it up a bit, I made these cars, and when they are having trouble saying what they need to say nicely, I ask them to go look for the right card for the situation. I'll admit, this only worked well for the older child who can read, and it is really the younger toddler who needs to work on talking nicely. I added some symbols to help her out, but we don't use them very much. Print 4 per page and cut them out.

I'm finding home schooling to be very fun, but also very consuming, and it seems I spend more of my efforts there now than at other creative pursuits. You can find more of my homeschool and church school printables here also. I kind of don't know what direction I'll be going in my own work this year, but that's kind of exciting, too. We'll see!